Lithium Ion : Tips & Tricks

Tips & tricks to enhance the life of your Lithium Ion batteries, while also operating them in a safer way that enhances their useful life by keeping them 30-80% partially charged, cool & dry! 

Always fully charge a new rechargeable battery to activate the cells. 1 Fully Deep cycle calibrates the cell voltage safety monitor readout that helps your devices estimate its state of charge as a % displayed. Lithium Ion common in most rechargeable electronics can be fully deeply cycled once every 500 hours of operation to re-calibrate the cell monitor circuit.

You will get the most life out of your batteries if your avoid heat & fully charging beyond 80%. Fully charging + heat causes the most rapid deterioration of most common lithium ion batteries present in consumer electronics devices of all kinds, including laptops, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, blue-tooth audio gear, portable navigation units, and an increasing number of IoT internet connected devices, like our nest thermostat unit which keeps its lithium ion battery intelligently parked at 3.82vdc :)

The Good

Most lithium ion batteries never catch fire presenting acceptable risks in most applications. Many lithium ion batteries end up swelling towards the end of their useful life. Constant all night long charging causes cell swelling by increasing the internal case pressure of the cell package.

People can preserve the integrity of their batteries by only charging for short windows of about 30min to 2 hours max. Shallow cycling between 30 & 80 percent charged will greatly reduce the risks of a fire while also enhancing the longevity of the cells by helping to keep the internal cell case pressure low which reduces fatigue on the cell material.

The Bad

Sometimes batteries explode when overcharged for long periods, like repeated overnight charging. More typically a malfunctioning lithium ion battery will experience thermal runaway in the rare event of a fire or venting with flame. More common in extreme failure modes is swelling along with smoke or fume emissions. Avoid fire, heat, water, and keep your lithium ion batteries cool & dry. Do not puncture or break, cut, drop, impact, twist or bend your batteries.

The Ugly

Explosions, Fire, Venting with Flame, Smoke, Fumes, Swelling, Bloating, Lithium Ion batteries burned down the Boeing 787 from operation with faulty batteries that vented with flame just like hover-boards that caught fire and all of this could have been avoided with prudent QA:QC at the manufacturing level. Shorting the cell could cause a thermal runaway, but most lithium ion batteries have a BMS or battery management system controller to prevent overheating, shorting, overcharging, deep discharging, pressure swelling shutoff and safety oriented features that protect the users & their property from battery failure damage. Sometimes things go wrong. When things are manufactures on the scale of 100 million, a small percentage (still a large number of devices) will experience batteries failures like the iPhone 8.

Heat Failure

Lithium Ion batteries suffer from heat fading worse than any other widely used secondary rechargeable energy storage battery. Heat greater than 70 Deg F ( 21 Deg C) accelerate the breakdown of Lithium Ion batteries in laptops, tablet computers, smartphones and other consumer electronic devices like modern electric vehicles.

Heat greater than 122 Deg F (50 Deg C) causes rapid capacity fade of lithium ion batteries while also accelerating the deterioration of the cell chemistry. Leaving a phone in direct Sun for example can cause the temperature of the battery case (especially if it is black color) to rise dangerously to near 180 Deg F (~82 Deg C).

High heat from direct sun, electric space heaters, GPU + CPU blanket laptop cooling fan intake port blocking, venting system obstruction, stoves, torches, lighters, fires, any kind of high heat source such as a hair dryer, engine, turbine, microwave oven, toaster oven, candles, propane or butane powered devices, anything that uses more than 5w of power can generate waste heat, away from your houses water heater and furnace. Keep lithium ions cool, around 50 Deg F (10 Deg C). Also never charge frozen lithium ion batteries. Try to keep the cells warmer than 32 Deg F (0 Deg C)

All Night Charging Failure

Sadly the charger that you use to charger you lithium ion electronics does not shallow cycled the cells safely. Most charging systems that people are using abusively charge the lithium ion battery cell beyond 4.26vdc.

Lithium Cobalt Carbon the most common Lithium ion battery type in smartphones, tablets and laptops because of its high energy density, is the most dangerous to overcharge. Charging LiCoC should be cutoff at 4.11vdc maximum, for 3.6, 3.7 & 3.8vdc batteries common in most consumer electronics.

Leaving your devices camped on the charger overnight will overcharge the batteries and cause the batteries to fail more quickly. Its much better to charge for 30minutes or 1 hour at a time in the morning when you roll out of bed or the evening when you are eating dinner or watching content.

Natural Timing Intervals 

Charging while you eat breakfast, lunch or dinner, with your phone nearby so you can easily unplug in once you are done eating & cleaning up after yourself! I feed my phone power while I eat energy containing food. Combining these 30 min - 1 hour long intervals with device charging makes for a natural reminder interval without setting up timers or alarms on your phone.

Plug your phone in and go for a walk or jog or run. I often charge my electronics with lithium batteries in a cool dry shaded location while I am in the shower and them go unplug the devices when I am dry.

Avoid Water 

Water is bad for electronics and I recommend never taking anything into the bathroom unless it is waterproof to 5atm of case pressure or better. Hot steamy water vapor from a bath or shower with heated water, spray, misting, condensation, vapor, electronics can experience corrosion from exposure to water, and most lithium ion battery contain sensitive board electronics in their integrated BSM controller (top of a user replaceable cell phone battery beneath the gold plated contact terminals, typically 3 or 4 small golden rectangles or contacts integrated into a hard plastic assembly which contains the BMS on top of the battery cell, electrically connected to the battery output tabs via solder connection and to the output terminals with solder wire connections.

30% - 80% charging Long Life Safer Mode Charging
It is much safer to keep lithium ion batteries partially charged between 30 & 80 % SOC by only charging for brief sub 2 hour windows of time as this keeps the anodes in the cells from swelling, protecting the cells at the molecular level. At the physical level it keeps cell pressure low in safer ranges, where case swelling and resulting physical damage to the electrodes is less likely.

30 to 80 shallow cycling helps to preserve the life of the battery cells. Lithium ion can last 20 year and up to 10,000 cycle if never heated beyond 77 deg F and kept between 30 & 80 % charged. Most people who overcharge their batteries all night start to see loss of capacity around 1 year of daily use and significantly shorter battery life after 2 years of daily all night charging. Most charging setups can fully charge a newer electronic device in less than 3 hours. Many chargers can fully charge a device battery system in 90 minutes or less.